Microservices

Dark-launches and Feature toggles are two great practices to deploy code faster to production and get early feedback. Combined with microservices architecture, it becomes a very powerful tool and once adopted, there is no turning back! You will be thrilled by the speed with which you can build and ship software in a safe manner! In this blog, I will try to explain what these terms means. Dark Launch Dark launch is a practice where you can test/validate your new functionality in production without having to worrying about disturbing the original workflow. This technique is very useful when writing a new version of the functionality or even adding more functionality that can be triggered based of any existing workflow. The steps to achieve it are very simple: Deploy the new functionality in prod.  Incase if it is new version of an existing functionality and you want to test correctness:  clone the request going into v1-logic —> then call the v1-logic —> clone the...

In my previous blog ( Microservices and Testing - Lessons Learned ), I talked about variation in the testing pyramid and how new flavors of Component Tests (with same good characteristics as those of Unit Tests) have gained momentum and are the primarily source for testing the entire µ-service stack in isolation. In this blog I will talk about how we use the same Component-Test setup to run local Chaos tests!  Microservice architecture is very susceptible to intermittent infrastructure/networking failures which makes Chaos-Engineering a very important aspect for a mature stack. Chaos-Engineering sounds bit chaotic but it is surprisingly easy to do in microservices architecture, specially the local chaos scenarios. To run a full blown Chaos Test, you will need to set aside some dedicated time and bring members from different teams together and run the experiments (Game days!). On the other hand, local chaos scenarios are the ones that you can run locally for your own service sta...